Last year in October, HBO made it clear that the company plans to enter the lucrative and ever expanding streaming TV market by rolling out its own standalone streaming service at some point in 2015. Quite predictably, the market was abuzz with all sorts of speculations within hours – with some even going to the extent that this could well be the end of cable television as we know it.

Adding more to these speculations, CBS announced only a day later that it too was preparing to join the bandwagon by launching a proprietary streaming service. Similar announcement came from Showtime, CBS’s flagship entertainment channel.

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Hulu has said that adapting viewable ads has helped bring in more business. This is contrary to what other Web publishers have experienced. Publishers have found viewable ads rather hurt ther bottom line than help business.

Without knowing what to expect Hulu’s senior vice president of advertising sales, Peter Naylor, said that selling ad space using viewability data paid off well.

“We are absolutely benefiting from viewability. In one case, seven days after a campaign started, we got incremental money,” said Mr. Naylor.

Hulu is explicitly designed for people to watch long-form video content on a video player without any need to scroll. There are no hidden banners, nor a multitude of pages.

“In order to make yourself lucky you have to design for viewabilty,” he said. “We don’t do autoplay video. We promise [brands that] people will watch full 30-second ads. So delivering two seconds (the minimum standard for viewable ads the industry has embraced) is no problem.”

Mr Naylor is empathatic towards Web publishers caught in the race of oversized Web ads and higher rates. They also face a growing mobile audience and the challenges of Web fraud.

“It’s an incredibly challenging time to be a publisher,” Mr. Naylor said. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen agencies deal with this push from ad agency procurement departments. It’s become the golden age of accountability. Now you’ve got all this complexity, and viewabilty is just another thing on the list.”

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Fandango, mostly known for its ticketing service on the web and for mobile devices for cinema viewings, has also been creating its own TV shows. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday last week, their service announced that its TV shows will soon, in the coming months hopefully, be showing on the Internet streaming service Hulu on a dedicated channel.

Fandango’s movie focused shows will be featured on a new channel on Hulu. The awards-focused interview show called Frontrunners will also be included. Within the first three months of 2015, the new channel is scheduled to go live. It is not only available to paying subscribers, but to anyone who visits Hulu’s site.

The vice president of business development and strategy, Mark Young, said that this is the next step in the company’s strategy to create videos that can be played on “any form factor or platform”.

“Our goal is to be wherever there’s conversations about movies, with partners that have scale and are in the right context,” he said.

Fandango could strike similar deals with other similar Internet TV streaming services. Since Hulu is largely about TV discovery, Young said it makes sense for Hulu to be a starting point. Fandango is owned by NBCUniversal which also backs Hulu.

Young said that by creating shows Fandango can move beyond being a simple utility. It gives certain benefits as it leads people to buy movie tickets from the company and helps bring in some money from ads.

Fandango say that views of original video content on the service has increased by 38 percent year-over-year.
So even though that is a really impressive growth figure, this new strategy might be paying of, and with new partnerships they might increase the views even more.

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Emily Kapnek, Selfie‘s creator and show-runner, announced on Monday that the remaining six unaired episodes will be available for streaming on Hulu.

The Warner Bros. Television comedy was canceled in November, with its seventh episode last broadcasting on the 11th. The show starred Karen Gillan and John Cho.

Kapnek took to twitter to inform fans that the first of the six unaired episodes will be released on Tuesday on Hulu, Hulu Plus and ABC.com. For the next five weeks, the remaining episodes will release, one for every week.

Selfie and Manhattan Love Story were part of an hour-long spot of romantic comedies on ABC. Both were cancelled with the latter being axed first.

Selfie opened up to a mediocre 5.3 million viewers and a 1.6 rating among adults 18-49. In the weeks that followed, the series failed to keep the attention of its few viewers, whose number shed by the week.

After Manhattan Love Story got the ax, ABC gave Selfie a bigger shot and doubled its originals on election night.

Hulu has been known for picking up unaired episodes of an ABC cancelled series before. In April 2013, Hulu gave James Van Der Beek and Krysten Ritter’s Apartment 23 a new home.

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In recent weeks, speculative reports have been circulating that Amazon is preparing to release an ad-supported free version of its Instant Video collection. Although the company has attempted to squash rumours by stating that it has not announced any such plans, it has neither denied the reports.

Amazon already offers free first episodes of selective serials with supporting ads, a spokesperson of the company reminded everyone. They also pointed out that Amazon uses ad-supported trailers, sticking to the fact that there has been no announcement of a free ad-supported online video collection.

“We’re often experimenting with new offers and experiences for customers, but we have not announced any plans to offer an ad-supported video-streaming service,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

Back in march, the e-commerce company stated that they had no plans on releasing any free version of their streaming services. But now, statements from Amazon representatives have a slight change in tone, to stating the obvious that nothing on the topic has been officially announced yet.

If free ad-supported streaming media services do become available , this could help bridge the gap between Amazon and Netflixin terms of peak internet traffic in the United States. Currently Amazon comes in second by attracting 2.58 perfect of internet traffic. This pales in comparison to Netflix’s 34.89 percent share of traffic during peak evening hours.

The New York Post is responsible for jet setting rumours of Amazon’s alleged plans as revealed by certain sources. These sources however did not state that the service would be free once supported by ads, as currently used by Hulu, but would be significantly lower than Netflix’s monthly subscription free of $9.99.

While Netflix’s recent surge of content acquisition has been comparatively frantic when put against past industry developments, one of their closest rivals, Hulu have been decidedly more relaxed over the idea of original content, stopping off only the odd few times to pick up something new that they like, such as Casual.

Following on from a pick-up of an adaptation to Stephen King time-travel novel 11/23/63, the planned new single-camera comedy is to begin production this year with their new full season order commissioned this week.

The series comes from the mind of Jason Reitman (Juno, Men Women & Children), who has laid out a story that looks to delve into ‘the complications of the family dynamic’. The premise will see a bachelor and his divorced sister living under the same roof whilst raising the latter’s teenage child, with the pair offering each other support and guidance in re-entering the dating game after their respective troubles.

Viewers in 2015 will be able to see 10 episodes of the show when it is launched, with Reitman confirmed as the director of the pilot. He will be teaming up with Zander Lehmann as a co-writer for the format. Lionsgate TV will produce the series, following on from their work on Hulu breakout series Deadbeat.

Reitman summarised the project, stating, “I’ve long looked for the right first step into episodic storytelling. In Zander Lehmann, I have found the perfect collaborator. His writing is hilarious and provocative.”

Head of content for Hulu who have just renewed a content deal with Viacom, Craig Erwich said, “Jason Reitman uniquely blends comedy and drama in a way that touches the human spirit. We are honored to work with him to bring the next distinctive voice, Zander Lehmann, to television.”

Well not quite television, but definitions don’t really matter all that much when the show itself has a name like, well…